Also, if all those bottles of liquid are worth being confiscated because they contain harmful chemicals, they are also to be disposed of by personel in hazmat with proper EPA considerations, namely audit, analysis and documentation. It would be fun to see a lawsuit along those lines.
I think the liquid ban is pretty silly, but that's because the whole idea of a liquid bomb seems to be unworkable, and there are better ways to handle this stuff. The fact that confiscated liquids are handled so casually is not actually an argument against the ban.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...
The extraordinarily stupid part is where they hypothetically confiscate such a liquid, and then they let the person go.
The liquid ban itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but if you grant their IMO faulty assumptions (that liquid bombs are a big threat), the way they carry it out is actually pretty reasonable.
I'm sure he did that when he first started, but being berated on a daily basis ("Are you calling me a liar?!") probably made him decide that his current method is the path of least resistance.